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Comment by getmeinrn | Hacker News Reader

>then the use of that content downstream is tainted

What does that mean exactly? That's why I used the "looking at a stolen painting" example.

Sure, pirating materials is illegal. But I don't think that's the big implication that people are getting at here. Is it legal to sell original works derived from perceiving stolen materials? Seems to me that it is.

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In this case the correct analogy would be you brought a stolen painting into your house, looked at it for a while, and then produced your derivative work.

Surely you see the issue here? Receiving stolen property?

Yes, I acknowledged that piracy is illegal in my previous post. That's not what the lawsuit is about, according to The Verge:

>In the OpenAI suit, the trio offers exhibits showing that when prompted, ChatGPT will summarize their books, infringing on their copyrights.

That serves as evidence that the model has seen the material, and the only way the model could have seen the material is if it was pirated.

You're missing the bigger picture[1]:

  Numerous questions of law or fact common to each Class arise from Defendants’ conduct:
    whether ChatGPT itself is an infringing derivative work based on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books;
    whether the text outputs of ChatGPT are infringing derivative works based on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books;

It's not a simple case of "you used our copyrighted materials", it's "you're infringing on our copyright by producing works derived from materials that you used."

1. https://llmlitigation.com/pdf/03223/tremblay-openai-complain...

That assumption is the reason why it's a shady argument for infringement. There's other ways to get a summary of a book than reading it, like asking a friend who's read it to give a summary

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